From Learners to Facilitators: Eight Days in Smolnik

From 5-12 November 2025 at Smolnik Youth Home in the Pohorje hills, thirty youth workers and educators gathered for an Erasmus-supported training led by Jošt Kozelj and Petra Jazbec, co-facilitators with nine years of experience across national and international events. Participants came from Bulgaria, Italy, Serbia, France, Germany, Spain, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, and the Netherlands and returned home with clearer facilitation identities, practical tools, and accountability partners to keep the learning alive.

The programme opened with shared intentions, common agreements, and a guiding question that shaped the week: who am I as a facilitator, and who do I want to become? A midweek highlight, graphic facilitation, began with the invitation “we all know how to draw” and moved into simple visual languages: frames, readable text and basic shapes that make complex ideas easy to follow. Public speaking and presence work, the facilitation triangle of results, process and relationships, and embodied reflection practices from Authentic Movement to quiet walk-and-talks in the forest linked skill with self-awareness. Each day concluded with structured reflection so that insights could settle before the next step.

The closing days turned the training into a live laboratory. In pairs, participants designed and ran real sessions while peers rotated as participants and observers. The cases addressed needs in youth and community work: rebuilding trust; helping a stuck group find movement in feelings and fears; nurturing multicultural understanding; guiding a decision group on how to use a communal space; clarifying roles and attitudes in collaboration; practicing respectful communication in conflict; aligning a regional network on shared goals; and turning an inspiring vision into a strategy for long-term action. Observers looked for clear purposes, care of participants, fit-for-goal methods, flexible co-facilitation and confident public presence, then folded their notes into each team’s redesign, while trainers closed with pair-level and group-level feedback so prototypes became better versions of themselves.

Tangible outcomes give this learning a life beyond the training. Twelve pilot workshop designs complete with roles, flow and materials are now ready to adapt in schools, youth centres and grassroots initiatives. A wall of visual posters, refined during the graphic facilitation day, stands as a reusable template bank. Participants left with action plans and accountability pairs, and documented their learning through Youthpass. Attention to distinct facilitation roles, the presenter holding the space and managing process, the timekeeper aligning agenda and flow, the note keeper capturing and clarifying, the heartkeeper tending energy and engagement, and the placekeeper caring for the room and resources, has already improved how time, space and attention are managed so groups can think clearly and act together.

Erasmus+ value was shown in practice rather than listed. Session briefs moved from why to how and what, demonstrating sound programme design; quiet handovers kept sessions on time and energy balanced, a concrete exercise in resource management; intercultural co-facilitation across eleven countries sharpened meaningful communication; and observer debriefs turned reflection into evaluative, civic next steps, planned for inclusive, low-impact settings.

To close, the group gathered in a gratitude circle and around a shared fire. The mood of that moment is echoed in this poem by Ama, one of the participants:

I took my awkward, tired me,
Who needed reassurance just to be;
I softened focus, set my ego free,
And turned myself to curiosity.

I learned to speak, to not repress,
Don't judge, don’t dance just to impress;
Respect, connect, let truth express
A gentler way to meet the stress.

I wasn’t aware of my needs, I confess,
I learned to pause, to truly rest,
To sit with quiet emptiness,
And trust the heart to do the rest.

Uncomfortable enough to try,
Safe enough to reach and fly;
We danced our fears til they’d die,
And laughed through tears we cannot deny.

—

Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the National Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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